Dave

[🎶𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 ✨ @Old_But_Gold50s]

Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest duets of all time, this 1987 archival footage from Ibiza captures the iconic song "Barcelona." It stands as a vivid testament to the perfect fusion of Montserrat Caballé’s sublime operatic vocals and Freddie Mercury’s captivating stage presence—a masterpiece that left an indelible mark on music history and went on to become the official and defining anthem of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

[Dave @d234]

@LPerrins @ZzVvbbbbn Not sure what annoys me more. The return scheme or the lids that stay attached. This nonsense cumulatively reduces trust/respect in the state. The nanny state budget (what people will put up with) should be spent on more important stuff (e.g. Nitrous Oxide restrictions).

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

I just can’t get over this photo from an anti-Israel march in Dublin on Saturday.

It’s not the flying of the Hezbollah flag that disturbs me, because sadly Hezbollah flags have become a semi-regular sight on the streets of Dublin.

It’s the look on this man’s face. No attempt to conceal his identity, a wide smile as he poses for the camera. This is the look of a man who knows man knows he will face zero repercussions - social, professional or otherwise - for waving the flag of an Islamist terrorist organisation responsible for countless atrocities, including the murder of an Irish soldier, Private Seán Rooney.

This is what our media class has actively stoked with their bias and disinformation, and what our government has enabled with their cowardly appeasement. This is Ireland in 2026.

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

The proper scientific name for the gas pedal in an electric car is "accelerator".

However, the scientific name for the other pedal is also "accelerator". Scientifically, "accelerate" means to "change speed", and both pedals do that.

Actually, "accelerate" means "change speed and direction" of the vector. The third accelerator in the car is erroneously named the "steering wheel".

[Dave @d234]

@VazeKshitij What's the book? (Is it more likely this image is ai generated or that there's a book out there with this slop?)

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

8,000 likes for a 500% zoom screenshot of half a page of an old (2017) Irish school book.

Zoomed in so far, presumably, for the sole reason to prevent people being able to read the rest of the page.

Disingenuous beyond belief.

I'll share a few facts about that school book. /1

[Colin Doherty @gastaut]

https://t.co/Mh6FQelOnZ

[Dave @d234]

@C4Countdown @Channel4 @ColinMurray @susie_dent @RachelRileyRR 25+1-9=17
17×9=153
+100

[么 ꜱ ᴀ ᴍ ꪜ, @___TheGOOdWitch]

Awesome explanation. So much better than someone saying Jesus sorted it out in Noah’s ark 6000 years ago…..

[Dave @d234]

Typical ending to support chats with AI:

[Lee Brown @leebrown2]

Goosebumps! People often ask, is Shakespeare still relevant? Here is a great example, from the Steven Colbert Show, in which Sir Ian McKellen delivers an extraordinary speech. Shakespeare’s words are timeless, urgent and important.

#Shakespeare #ianmckellen #stevencolbert

[Haider. @haider1]

Computer scientist Judea Pearl:

There are mathematical limits to LLMs that cannot be crossed by scaling alone

LLMs don't discover world models from raw data; they merely summarize the interpretations humans have already written down

"this path is not the way to get AGI"

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

Annie McCarrick was a 26 year old student from Long Island, New York. She had fallen in love with Ireland moved into a flat in Sandymount. On the morning of the 26th of March 1993. Annie spoke with her flatmates before they left town for the weekend. She was in good form and making plans. Her mother, Nancy, was due to visit from New York in a few days. Annie talked about showing her Dublin, and introducing her to this new Irish life.

Around 11 a.m., Annie was seen on Sandymount Road, visiting the AIB bank, then popping into Quinnsworth for messages. By mid-afternoon, she returned to her flat. Later her shopping would be found sat on the kitchen table, still in the bags. No note or sign of struggle. The scene her flatmates discovered silently implied that something or someone had interrupted her.

Sometime after 3 p.m., Annie left the apartment again. Witnesses saw her on the number 44 bus heading toward Enniskerry, and possibly later that afternoon at Johnnie Fox’s Pub in Glencullen in the Dublin Mountains. That sighting has haunted the case ever since. Was it Annie, or was it a young woman who looked like her? In a tourist spot like that a good looking young woman with red hair and American accent wouldnt have been as rare.

If Annie did make it into the mountains that day, she vanished into one of the most searched landscapes in Irish criminal history. The Wicklow Mountains were combed in the days and weeks that followed. Gardaí searched ravines, forestry tracks, bogland, abandoned building without finding a trace.

There was an epidemic of women dissapearing in the 1990s, often after brief journeys, clustered around what became known as the Vanishing Triangle. The DTM will revisit that another day. In later investigations, friends revealed that Annie had spoken of being harassed by a man she knew. She had told people she felt watched and most seriously had been assaulted shortly before her disappearance.

For thirty years, Annie McCarrick remained officially missing. In 2008, Gardaí reopened the case. In 2023, on the thirtieth anniversary of her disappearance, it was formally upgraded to a murder investigation.

Then, in June 2025, came the most dramatic development in decades. A man in his sixties was arrested on suspicion of Annie’s murder. He was questioned, then released without charge. Shortly afterward, Gardaí searched a property in Clondalkin using cadaver dogs and forensic teams. Again, nothing was found.

But the case is no longer dormant. Witnesses have been re-interviewed.
Annie’s father, John, sadly died in 2009 without ever knowing what happened to his daughter. Her mother, Nancy, continues to ask Ireland to remember the young woman who came here full of hope and never made it home.

If you have any info contact Irishtown Garda Station at 01 6669600, your local Garda Station or the Garda Confidential telephone line 1800 666 111

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.

Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone.

We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream.

We didn't have version control. Public forge sites wouldn't be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.

You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.

Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day.

Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test...and I'm still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!

This meditation isn't supposed to be about me, though. It's about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I've lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world's knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn't have said "never" (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn't have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.

We've come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I've lived through and learned was just prologue.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Published in the Irish Times six years ago. I always think of this letter at this time of year. So moving.

[Micheál Martin @MichealMartinTD]

The proposal to rename Herzog Park should be withdrawn in its entirety and not proceeded with.

[Dr. Alexandra Herzog @alexandratali25]

Dublin City Council’s move to strip my grandfather’s name from Herzog Park is deeply troubling.

Chaim Herzog was born in Belfast, attended school in Dublin & fought the Nazis as an Irishman.

Irish Jewish history is part of Ireland’s history. Protect it.

#HandsOffHerzogPark

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

We are living through the dumbest possible version of 2025.

Quote: "Shame on Simon Harris for tyrannically blocking the will of the people! Conor McGregor for President to save Ireland."

Anybody who believes this shite is living on another planet. 🤣

I'll go through facts. /1

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

Fox News aired a segment on crime in Ireland, specifically Dublin, on 'The Will Cain Show'.

The most brazen manipulation of statistics you're ever likely to see, lapped up by Trump-voters who don't care if something is true or not.

I'll counter this garbage with facts. /1